Dame Morbid's Tournament
Every year, in the White Wastes on the southern tip of Porcina, in the capitol city of Vori, there is a grand tournament. Banners are thrown up all over the city, and the event is celebrated for weeks prior. The streets are filled with Vori's natives, gleefully drunk--while, at the same time, travelers from across the realms come on foot, by boat, or atop magic carpets.
The Grand Tourney, as it is called, is unlike anything else in the world. For a week, hundreds of monsters and adventurers fight to the death by day, and the remaining groups celebrate their victories by night. An elderly woman named Dame Morbid presides over the event, and it's rumored that she and her underlings devote their entire year to capturing, raising, and summoning the challenges pitted against the combatants.
Most PC adventurers are heroic bastions of good in a land torn apart by evil, inspiring the world with their world-changing ways. Not you. You've come to Vori to compete in the Grand Tourney knowing full well that your chances for victory are low. You've got no money, you've got no adventuring party. All you have are the magic items from your better years, and a dull feeling that this might be your last, best chance at leaving a name people will remember.
Morbid's rules:
1. Combatants may bring their own equipment.
2. There is no retreat from a fight, or escape from the city.
3. You will be assigned a combat team. You will meet them five minutes before the first event.
4. So long as one team member survives the fight, all team members will be raised from the dead.
5. There can be only one winning team.
DM (my) rules:
1. Make a level 4 character, using any WOTC-approved sources that you would like. All races without the oversized weapon ability are welcome. No bugbears.
You start with one level 5 magic item, one level 4 magic item, and one level 3 magic item. You also start with 680gp to spend as you see fit.
2. I will put you into 5-person parties. I'm going to try to have parties that don't lack any roles, so the more varied the better. Artificers, barbarians, bards, invokers, etc. etc. Use 'em if you got 'em.
3. Don't worry too much about a backstory. It should be able to be hastily explained in one minute before the doors open and your fledgling team is thrown into the ring.
4. Each team will face similar (fairly deadly) threats. Parties that die are out of the competition. Characters whose players drop from the face of the internet will be taken over by me until the fight is over, and then the party will be reformed (keeping the original as intact as possible).
5. Last teams standing will fight one another until either one team is fully dead, or until everyone gets bored of watching a 10-person fight slowly post its way along.
I also need people to step forward and volunteer to be DM's. I won't be running however many games we get. I'll be taking a few and then watching over everything, but I'll need people to run specific fights. So, with your character submissions, please indicate if you'd be interested in DMing a couple teams and, if so, how many you think you could handle. Once you express interest, I'll talk with you about how the teams should be run, and all other mundane details.
